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By Reginald A. Ray, Ph.D.

My principal meditation teacher was Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first Tibetan lamas to present meditation in the West.

During the 17 years that I knew him,
from 1970 until his death in 1987, he transmitted the somatic Vajrayana
lineage to me and his other senior students. Since his death, I have
been fortunate to have the time and the opportunity to explore
extensively Rinpoche’s transmission through study, practice—and most importantly, teaching—where I have learned the most.One single concept best characterizes
the instruction that Rinpoche received from his teachers and that he
wanted to pass on to his students: “embodied spirituality.” But in using
this term, what are we talking about? The somatic approach teaches that the
spiritual is already, from the beginning, implicit within what we call
the material—not only in our own physical body but also (as we shall
discuss further below) in the larger body of our incarnate situation in
the cosmos. This means that the essential nature of our incarnational
materiality, both what is inside (body) and what is outside (cosmos), is
already primordially and inherently spiritual. Trungpa Rinpoche taught that authentic spirituality
cannot exist apart from embodied reality because disembodied
spirituality is exclusive, separationist, and incomplete. Any attempt to
present spirituality as disembodied is a bogus spirituality, a
conceptualized, self-serving construct; at the end of the day, it is
simply ego’s game, all over again, just on a subtler and more hidden
level, what Trungpa called “spiritual materialism.”The somatic view of Vajrayana
Buddhism has revolutionary implications for our meditation practice as
modern people and for our spiritual journey altogether. As mentioned, it
means that our spiritual life, far from involving a distancing and
separating from our body and all the realities of our physical
incarnation, requires just the opposite: we must turn toward our body
and our life as the proper and only possible arena for authentic
spiritual development—as the only place where our path can unfold and as
the only possible true access point for our genuine realization.

Anything else is a chimera, a dream.

When I talk about embodied spirituality in the book, The Awakening Body, then, I mean that connecting with our body and our ordinary life are not add-ons: they are the practice of spirituality; they are what the spiritual journey is all about.The somatic point of view is that the
spiritual journey can only really begin within the depths of our
incarnation; that we make the full journey only by exploring our own
actual experience as an incarnational being, as it progressively
discloses itself in our practice and our life; and that, in the end,
this body is what we realize in all of its dimensions, in all of its
subtlety and depth. This is the ultimate spiritual illumination, the
long-sought elixir of life, the realization of nirvana. There isn’t
anything beyond this for, as I hope to show you, this is the
illumination of the totality of Being.We can further clarify what embodied spirituality is by seeing what it isn’t. In many of the traditional religions
of both West and East, including many forms of Buddhism, the spiritual
life is understood as a process of separating oneself from everything
that is problematic and nonspiritual in order to gain higher,
“spiritual” states of meditative awareness. And what are these
nonspiritual things that one is separating oneself from? All that seems
ordinary, mundane, and “worldly”; the body and all that is seated in it,
including instincts and sensations; feelings, emotions, and bodily
perceptions; human attachment and sexuality; all that feels potentially
problematic, chaotic, and obstructive in our life, all that triggers us,
activates us, and stirs us up and leaves us feeling confused, troubled, and incomplete.Meditation
is often viewed as a way to separate ourselves from all of this and
rise above it, to get to an altitude where we can relax into a space
that is unobstructed and peaceful. This goal of separation seems to
reflect a somewhat negative attitude toward our regular life and the
ordinary world as if, at least in a spiritual sense, those things don’t
hold very much of importance for us. And so we often practice meditation
as a process of progressive distancing
and disembodiment, where we are employing meditative techniques to
separate what we feel are the “higher” part of ourselves—our more pure,
clear, and clean parts—from everything that is lower—all the mundane,
ordinary, pained, nagging, struggling parts. This approach leads, as mentioned, to a state of spiritual dissociation.

The process might look like this:

We sit
down to meditate and use a technique to try to calm the distress and
chaos in our mind, disturbances perhaps fueled by our compulsive
thinking, painful memories of unresolved situations or relationships,
aggressive competitiveness, and distressing feelings and emotions. We
try to smooth the turbulence of all the things that seem to be closing
in on us, suffocating us, creating an intense claustrophobia. This
tranquilization of our minds is a well-known practice in Buddhism called
shamatha, or
mindfulness, mentioned earlier. The powerful techniques for this can
indeed induce the desired effects and, as our minds begin to quiet down,
we may then enjoy a more peaceful and open state.

But here is where things get very
tricky: the practice of meditation as a process of tranquilization
typically implies a conscious intention, a mental image of what we are
looking for, and a process of deliberate inclusion and exclusion leading
us toward our desired spiritual goal. This is tricky because of our
remarkable human capacity to limit and control experience: witness the
human ego itself. It has been estimated that out of every million parts
of information received and processed by our body, we humans only admit
13 parts into our conscious awareness.That means we only allow ourselves to be conscious of .000013 percent of the data, of experience, known to our body. That capacity to limit and control
our experience is operational in the way mindfulness is practiced by
many of us, although we may be quite unconscious of this fact. What
often happens with many of us is that we are able, with sufficient
discipline and willpower, to get ourselves into something like the
desired state; but it takes a tremendous amount of effort of separation
and exclusion of everything else to get there and it leaves us in a bit
of a trance.

The positive benefits of this kind of meditation should not be minimized:

to have a way to separate ourselves, at least for a time, from all that is problematic and painful in ourselves and our lives

to have a safe haven to retreat to in the midst of life’s storms

to be able to rest and recuperate can have considerable benefits.

This kind of meditation thus becomes a
powerful panacea helping us to remove ourselves from the more seamy and
squalid, the more difficult and anxiety-ridden realities of daily life:
“What a relief!” Some would argue—some do argue—that
this is exactly what meditation is for and, for that reason, we should
enthusiastically embrace the capacity it gives us to step out and
temporarily dissociate, to disembody, from our embedded, bodily
existence. Meditation in this sense is clearly an oasis and an important
one in our life, but, as Nietzsche famously remarked, “Where there are
oases, there are also idols.”Taking us in quite another direction,
the somatic teachings see the spiritual life as a journey toward ever
fuller and more complete intimacy and even identification with our human
incarnation—and we are not talking about just the “nice” parts. This
means surrendering our separate spiritual stance, our “spiritual” self,
and falling into contact, communication, alignment, and, finally, union
with the most ordinary, basic aspects of our human existence, as they
are. These include everything we go through, our whole somatic
existence, with its sensations, bodily perceptions, feelings, and
emotions—including all of our ordinary mental life, the ups and downs,
the confusion, the pleasure and pain, everything.

For somatic spirituality,
our problem is not, as in conventional spirituality, that we are too
close to these mundane features of our life but rather that we are too
far away from them; our problem is not that we are too embodied (the
disembodied approach), but that we are not embodied enough.

The only place we can truly,
authentically, and fully wake up is in the midst of life—right in the
middle of our quotidian life, exactly as it is. The somatic lineage is thus
life-affirming to an absolute degree; it is, in Trungpa Rinpoche’s
words, “ultimate positivity”: we walk the path toward realization by
abandoning any sense of distinction between our spiritual journey and
our life journey that consists of the specific, gritty realities of our
ordinary existence; in fact they are one and the same.Many writers in our contemporary
culture are articulating these or similar ideas. However, simply having
this perspective on a purely intellectual or conceptual level is going
to be of limited help for ourselves or our world. If, on the contrary,
through the somatic methods, we come to see and experience this for
ourselves, it changes everything.

We no longer need to be
minimizing or denying large parts of ourselves or be engaged in a
constant struggle to free ourselves from the mundane aspects of
ourselves and our lives.

Quite the opposite, we are now fully
and thoroughly liberated into a complete acceptance and openness to
everything we are, to see for ourselves that everything we go through is
an engagement with the heart of reality itself. Moreover, the somatic
approach shows us how to meet the most painful and problematic
situations, emotions, and people in our life and to find within those
difficult aspects of our life the next step on our path or spiritual
journey. In short, to see the grittiness of the world and, more than
that, to experience it directly as the blessing we have been searching
for.The approach of somatic spirituality
shows us how to transform the yuck and poison of our own negativity into
something fresh, wholesome, and creative. And then, finally, the most
simple and ordinary aspects of our human experience become sources of
insight, freedom and joy, and revelations of the deepest mysteries of
the universe. Thus it is that if we turn our back
on our body and our bodily existence—on the ordinary, the commonplace,
and mundane—we are turning our back on what is ultimately and finally
real; we are giving up our one opportunity to find our own true and
destined place within the infinity of being.

The direct experience of THIS is exactly experienced in me (us) beyond both THIS IS IT and THIS IS NOT! Each Now, THIS should be experienced anew beyond both the habitual, fixed “THIS is IT” and the indispensable negating “THIS is NOT!”. THIS beyond THIS and NOT!

JUST THIS in our daily world is too boring, so nothing special. Everywhere we naturally have THIS, wherever we are, wherever we go . We are usually not even conscious of it at all. We are already in the ocean of THIS without fail, without paying attention. Therefore, everything is habitually going on, even THIS. Once we (cosmos) are ignited by the fire of THIS awareness by/with THIS experience, suddenly the whole Univerself (you, me, our families, all living beings) are
awakening/actualizing/embodying/opening/flowering/laughing as THIS active/mindful/awakening NOW.

As this experience, the new universe is born breath-by-breath in the midst of our muddy world reality. This is our One_Experience. Our daily chaotic busy way need not be boring (and blind) if we discover THIS New habit-less awakening of Now-universe even in the midst of our messy city lives. Depending on ourselves, our sensitivity, each of our daily encounters is ever-habitual, ever-boring, OR This encounter is awakening, wondrous, opening, unknown, New-Life-being-born, New–cosmos.

“All is one, one is all”, my master’s master replied to me once, and his words are only understood when we are JUST THIS.“ When we are JUST THIS” means we discover/experience THIS and also we are discovered/experienced by THIS inseparably at the same time (as one Univerself-function).

THIS is ever-deepening Life as each Now is being born so fresh at/by unknown concrete encounters, for example, This_One_breathing_awareness, being called by someone, meeting with a street cat, or.... We do not need anything else at all!

“Through his own deep experience, Reggie Ray
skillfully guides us into an awakened bodily life. He offers necessary,
wise, and liberating practices of realization within our mysterious
human form.”
—Jack Kornfield, PhD, author of A Path with Heart
“Touching Enlightenment provides
readers with a fresh look at the steps required to turn our
understanding of enlightenment into full embodiment—a vital process that
determines the way in which we actually conduct our lives. An
indispensible book for the serious practitioner.”
—John Daido Loori, abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery and author of True Dharma Eye: Master Dogen’s Three Hundred Koans
"Reggie Ray’s approach to the dharma is wonderfully fresh while also radically rooted in the foundation of the Buddha’s meditation instruction—mindfulness of body. He has a richly textured understanding of the lived body as the vessel of wisdom mind, as well as the carrier of all the karmic patterns that obscure this pristine awareness. Highly recommended."
—John Welwood, author of Toward a Psychology of Awakening Excerpts:

"This breathing practice also helps us uncover the energy that ultimately is the big toe... ...our seemingly solid physical sensations of the big toe are a substantialized and solidified experience of a more primary experience of the big toe: that it is actually a vibrating, scintillating field of energy... in a sense, we become the energy of the big toe, we are it."

"... by sensing it and
feeling it, not just as the body does, but as the body. We begin to
experience moments when we realize that, fundamentally, "we" are the
body. As we find ourselves in greater and greater somatic embodiment, we
discover deeper and deeper contact with this world. At this point, our
conclusions about it recede into relative unimportance. Life is then
less and less about thinking and more and more about simply being."

"When we bring our breath consciously into different parts of our body,
there is the physical part, in this case pulling the breath in through
the pores of the skin. But at a deeper level, there is the inner breath,
by which we are bringing the life energy into that particular part of
our body..."
"...Now you are breathing through the entire body,
through every pore of the entire body, into every portion of its
interior, all its bones, muscles, and organs, into all the cells of the
body. Just work on that for a few minutes. It isn't easy, but if you
stay with it, the energy, attention, and sense of intense vitality will
become greater and greater.

As you are breathing through the
entire body, notice if there are any places that perhaps seem a little
dead or a little resistant to the breath, and you can emphasize those
areas a bit. You are still breathing through the entire body, but you
are ending up in that particular spot, trying to bring more life to it,
more energy, more awareness, more feeling of being awake and sensitive
and sentient.

Continue this for another minute or two. Try to
make a lot of effort now, maximize your effort and exertion to the
utmost, breathing in through every pore of your body, into every single
cell of your body, surface and depth, simultaneously.

Then when
you think you can't possibly do any more, you can just let go of the
technique and lie quietly. Feel the energy circulating throughout your
body. This is the inner breath, the prana, which is your vitality,
flowing through your nadis, or energy pathways. Your body is now very,
very awake, and you can feel an electricity flowing everywhere. Stay
with this for several minutes, enjoying it and being completely in the
flow. Stay with it until you feel really satisfied. After resting for a
few more minutes, you can sit back up. As you do so, continue this sense
of the full body, cellular breathing but gently now with a very light
touch."

"We realize that our body feels, senses, knows its
interconnection with all things. In fact, we are, we exist, only in and
through interconnection; ultimately, we are nothing other than
"interbeing," in Thich Nhat Hanh's beautiful phrase. All of this becomes
increasingly clear the deeper we enter into our somatic existence...
...modern science is showing us that there is no solid, impermeable,
discrete envelope to our individual body and that we are in constant and
open-ended exchange with our larger bodies, just as our brain is with
our lungs, our bones with our circulatory system: the same principle,
just a larger scale."

"We have seen how the interior of our
physical body unfolds first as more open than we had suspected, then as
the space of our own awareness itself. In our further unfolding, again
we saw, we discover that this "interior space" is not limited to our
body at all, but is to be found "outside" of us, as a cosmic reality, in
the earth beneath us; in this unfolding of our cosmic body, we discover
an increasing boundlessness to our own awareness."

"...This
standpoint, so to speak, of an experience of the earth beyond subject
and object opens the way for the unfolding of a different way of being
in and with the rest of the cosmos. Initially, we may begin to feel
something very strong calling us - calling, calling continually: a
mountain we have seen, a glacier, a particular valley, an open vista, a
certain hillside or place in the forest, a tree, a river, a lake. We
start to sense - although we cannot quite believe it - that the
mountain, for example, is alive, and aware, and strongly inviting us,
pulling us in its direction. There is something about it that is drawing
us to it in the most compelling way. We may dream about it at night and
feel its call during the day. What we feel is entirely somatic: our
hearts are on fire and its call is resonating throughout our bodies.
Such is the depth of somatic life, of *feeling* life, that is now
becoming our way of being."

"Have you ever been present to a
raindrop falling on a window sill, watched its great globule tumbling
into sight, splashing on the sill, spreading out in slow motion, and
exploding into a thousand specs of light? Have you ever gazed into a
campfire, suddenly finding yourself within it, discovering your own
state of being as nothing other than the raging inferno, burning,
burning, burning, fueled by all it meets? Have you contemplated a lake
and suddenly found yourself lost in its endlessly wet and watery world?
Have you glanced up into a great tree only to meet an ancient presence
looking back at you with immense understanding and care? Have you ever,
one day, looked up at the sky and realized with a sudden, electric shock
that courses through your body, that you are meeting a vast shimmering
awareness, incredibly alive, that is watching you, utterly seeing you
through and through, holding you within its boundless love?"

"...The mountain is our heart, the running streams, our blood; our mind,
the limitless sky; our thoughts, the small passing clouds. Ultimately,
we are nothing other than these."